Ways in Which My Brother Resembled Evelyn Waugh

We didn't know what to do last Christmas, so we decided to hold a book swap. Two book swaps, actually: one with the family in Oklahoma City and one among friends in Washington, DC. The book I drew was the one submitted by Kate, a biography of Evelyn Waugh by Paula Byrne called Mad World (Kate, incidentally, drew mine, A Reader on Reading by Albert Manguel). I've written previously about Evelyn Waugh and Joey; Waugh was, as near as I can tell, his favorite writer, and I always sensed that one reason for this was that he found something in Waugh that he identified with, a certain way of relating to the world that coincided with his own. Reading Mad World confirmed this suspicion.

The book is a sort of dual biography, with Waugh on one side and the family that inspired the characters in Brideshead Revisted on the other. It's capably written, but the tone is a bit breathless and the prose a bit platitudinous for my taste; I also felt Byrne wanted me to be more scandalized by Waugh's undergraduate dabblings in homosexuality than I really was. Still, it was an absorbing read. One of its great strengths is that it quotes copiously from what other people said about Waugh as well as from his own private letters. This creates a complex, multifaceted portrait of the man: people look different when we see them through the eyes of those who knew them, and it's fascinating to compare those external assessments with the person's own self-presentation. As I was reading I began to note points of similarity between Waugh and Joey, some of which are apparent in Waugh's novels but others of which I hadn't considered before.

I therefore offer the following list of the ways in which they resembled one another, not because I think Waugh's life somehow holds the key to Joey's, or because I think there's some mystical connection between the two (although I do like to imagine them sipping brandy together in some book-lined corner of the afterlife), but mostly because reading about Waugh helped to clarify and remind me of things about Joey. I am, like most people who knew him, terrified of forgetting what Joey was like, so it's useful to have another person out there whose experiences, habits, and tastes were so similar and so well-documented that they can act as a sort of prompt for my memories of Joey - an external hook on which to hang my own recollections.

The list:

1) Waugh had expensive tastes - especially in hotels, meals, drinks, and books. Waugh always stayed at the finest hotels and consumed the finest comestibles, even when these things exceeded his means. This, as anybody who's been reading this blog knows, also describes my brother. Waugh also had a passion for rare, finely bound books, especially if they were on handmade paper (his father worked for a publishing house and seems to have instilled this taste in him). He once told his wife that if their house ever caught fire, she should save the books first and then the children; children, after all, were replaceable, but the books were not. I can imagine Joey making exactly the same joke (at least I think it was a joke). I plan to return to the topic of Joey's books in a later post.

2) Waugh spent much of his early adulthood leading a peripatetic life. For much of his twenties he traveled the world and wrote about it, priding himself on his ability to pack up all his possessions and move anywhere at a moment's notice. He traveled to Guiana, Ethiopia (twice), the Arctic (where he almost died), and several other places during this period, writing a few jaundiced but mediocre travel books along the way. When he was back in England he stayed with his parents and his friends, drifting from setting to setting like one of the charming opportunists of his novels. Joey didn't live quite long enough to do all the world traveling that he wanted to, but he certainly had a Waugh-like dearth of possessions, and for most of his adult life he also had no fixed abode. The one apartment he did have for a few years in Arlington, Virginia, was certainly fixed, but it was no one's definition of an abode. I know because I tried to sleep on the couch there once or twice.

3) Waugh enjoyed drinking and valued friends who would join him in great bouts of rowdy drunkenness. I'll say no more on that topic.

4) The friendships Waugh formed in college were among his closest and most lasting. Waugh's background was solidly middle-class, but at Oxford he became acquainted with the dissolute world of the declining aristocracy, and this became his preferred milieu for the rest of his life. Waugh was frequently accused of snobbery, and he undoubtedly was a snob, but he always remained one step removed from the callow selfishness and ridiculous excess that characterized the Bright Young Things of the jazz age. Indeed, this is what made his novels so funny: he was simultaneously fascinated by and disdainful toward the people of his own social circle, and he could make them incredibly entertaining on the page. Joey's circle at UVA was not quite of this sort, of course (hi, guys!), but I think he was similarly fascinated and appalled by the moneyed classes that populate that school (an aristocracy of an altogether different sort), partly because his of his own somewhat provincial background. Joey's close friends, of course, were much more like Joey than Waugh's aristocratic friends were like Waugh, but they were similarly hard-won. Like Waugh, Joey took a few years to find his niche. Once it turned up, however, it became a very cozy niche indeed (see #3).

5) During parties or large gatherings Waugh had a tendency to clam up, observing but not joining the mayhem, gathering material for his books. Among small groups of close-knit friends, however, he dazzled with his wit and charm. Many people said that he was the funniest person they ever knew, and this may be why he had so many friends, or at least so many friends of a certain type: his friends were people who valued laughter and abhorred bores. His letters were riddled with inside jokes, many of them so incomprehensible to outsiders that they became a sort of secret code (several of his books were that way, too). If you knew Joey, then you know that most of the above describes him as well. One day I'll print out all of his emails to me and turn to them when I feel like spending a little time in his presence.

6) Although Waugh had a reputation for curmudgeonry, he was really much softer than he seemed. Waugh built his reputation writing scathing, bitter satires of the modern world, but his best-loved novel (though hardly his most representative) is a long, nostalgic paean to a world of refinement, taste, and beauty that he believed was being bulldozed by progress. Beneath the smirking exterior there was warmth and gentleness and a shameless, even goopy sentimentality. Similarly, Joey could often affect weary irritability, and he fairly exuded unsurprisability (except when driving), but you didn't have to scratch too hard to find the goop hidden within. Indeed, with Joey, you often didn't have to scratch at all.

7) Many of their closest friends were women with whom they were not romantically involved. Intimate but platonic male-female friendships shouldn't be that unusual in our culture, but they are; they were even more so in Waugh's day. I think what lay behind these friendships was a respect for women and a genuine delight in their company, and this, in turn, made Waugh and Joey safe and appealing friends. While Joey certainly had plenty of male friends and enjoyed many conventionally male activities - especially sports - he was never a dude's dude. Even when he played football in high school he was never one with the jocks. He was too sensitive and kind (and smart) to ever feel comfortable among the chest-thumping, beer-swilling, fag-bashing knuckle draggers of the world, but in our corner of America there weren't that many alternative models of masculinity around. The company of women was probably, for Joey, a refuge from the coarseness of that world; and of course Waugh spent much of his life surrounding himself with people and things that would shield him from a similar coarseness.

8) Both Waugh and Joey reveled in extended periods of inactivity. In fact, they elevated inactivity to an art form. Waugh frequently berated himself for his laziness, but a lazy person wouldn't write the books Waugh wrote or travel the places Waugh traveled. Joey, I think, would more accurately characterize his lifestyle as one of targeted, carefully apportioned activity. Energy, to him, was a finite resource that one shouldn't squander on just anything, it was something to be saved up, even to the point of hording, and then deployed at the moments when it will be the most effective. With Joey, periods of inactivity were nothing more than latent activity. What might look like lethargy to most people - summers spent lolling on the couch, mornings spent snoozing in bed - were for him simply periods of "resting up" before the next big exertion, like a battery returned to its charger.

There are probably as many differences between Joey and Evelyn Waugh as there are similarities, but the differences don't interest me. What interests me is catching a glimpse of my brother in a biography of someone whom he admired and with whom he identified. It pleases me to think that others who read this book will also, without even knowing it, be reading about Joey.

My Best Man

I got married just about a year ago, and Joey wasn't there.

He was supposed to have been my best man. I asked him a few months before the wedding, on the phone, in the course of a conversation ostensibly about something else. It was our way to bury the lead (as they say in the newspaper business), to act as if nothing in the world was surprising or shocking or scary or exciting or really worth much more than a smirk and a shrug. So I shrugged him my request and he shrugged me his reply, but my heart was racing as I asked him, and I knew from his casual "thanks", offered just before we hung up, that he was touched. It happened just as I predicted it would.

But I really didn't know what to expect from him as best man. Would he try to organize some sort of bachelor party? Would he give some sort of moving or funny speech? I was never in any doubt about who should be my best man - I knew who my best man would be long before I knew who I would marry - but the role of best man would have required something of Joey that was not normally part of our emotional repertoire. To be a best man requires, during the toast anyway, a certain emotional candor: you can joke and tease and tell ribald stories if you like, but at some point you have to become sincere, even a little hokey, as you wish the couple all the happiness in the world and express your unfailing love and support.

Joey and I did not do hokey, at least not in front of each other, and especially not when others were looking. We had both served as best men in other weddings (indeed, I had recently been the dude of honor at the wedding of my friends Emiko and Steve), and, although I don't know anything about the sort of toasts Joey would give, I imagine he went for the same balance of wit and sincerity that I had attempted in mine. But to be honest, had it been his wedding, I would have struggled. The wit would not have been a problem, and there are plenty of embarrassing stories I could have told, but the sincerity? You might as well ask me to take my clothes off and dance on the table. I could do it for other people, but not for him.

When our mother turned fifty, her friends threw her one of those "when I am an old woman I shall wear purple clothes and a red hat" parties. Honestly. I'm not sure what all the components of the party were, but I do know that one element was a sort of scrapbook to which Joey and I were asked to contribute something - a poem, if I'm remembering correctly - and we both complied with the request. Some time later, when we were both back home, our mother offered to let us see the scrapbook, but we both declined. We hadn't seen each other's poems, and we didn't want to. In fact, I distinctly remember explaining to her that I didn't want to see Joey's poem because then I would lose all respect for him, a sentiment with which he expressed his firm agreement. I knew that my poem had been heartfelt and sincere, and I feared his had been the same, and I no more wanted to see his than I wanted him to see mine.

I should point out that we were usually this way with everybody, not just each other; for complex reasons having to do with nature, nurture, gender, a swelling in the part of the brain that controls motor functions, and probably something resembling insecurity, we did not offer the world many glimpses behind the curtain. We were both growing out of it, I think, allowing more and more people to see our vulnerabilities and so forth, but that is much easier to do with people you haven't known your whole life. We had had twenty-eight years of brotherness through which to develop a rhythm, a style of interaction, that was simultaneously intimate - like speaking-in-code intimate - and aloof, and there was no way that was going to change without a prolonged and deliberate act of will. Or wills.

I like to think that he would have indulged in a bit of hokey sincerity in his best-man toast, but I really can't say how likely that was. I do think I had been trying to tear open the curtain a little bit in those last few months. My asking him to be my best man, subdued though it may have been in the execution, was itself quite a bold step in that direction. Several months earlier, Kate and I had decided that we would tell him, before we told anyone else, that we were engaged. That was another heart-racing moment, sitting in a darkened Nashville pub with Kate beside me, as I waited for a suitably inconspicuous moment to tell him our news with as much nonchalance as I could muster. He adjusted himself in his chair and smiled, which was how I knew he was moved, but otherwise he accepted the news as calmly as he would have accepted the news that we were planning to buy a new toaster.

I tried several times in the following days, as we drove together on what would be our last road trip to Oklahoma, to draw him out a little on the subject - I said how weird it was to be getting married, I even asked him if he and Tina might do the same thing someday - but all I got were evasions and monosyllables, although he did finally say that he "wouldn't be surprised" if he and Tina might someday get married. "Well," I thought (but didn't say), "I should certainly hope you wouldn't be surprised."

This is what I was up against. But as I said, this was difficult territory for me, too; neither of us quite knew how to show one another the men we had grown up to be. But I do think we would have gotten there in time, and the wedding would have accelerated that process substantially, whatever sort of toast he ended up giving.

As it happened, four people stood in for Joey on the day of our wedding. Our three cousins - Clay, Michael, and Jake - stood beside me during the ceremony, and my old friend Jason gave the toast. They'll never quite know just what that meant to me. And the wedding, well, if you've been reading this blog for a while - and, of course, if you were at the wedding - then you know what the wedding itself meant. The word that keeps returning to me is "elevated." It elevated me, us, leaving us on a higher plane - permanently, I think - where everything glows just a little bit brighter. It's a paradox, but it's true, that in his absence he somehow became more present, as if his energy and his love had been rerouted through all the other people there. And if that's not hokey sincerity, I don't know what is.

I've just been reading the last of the Tennyson poem tonight, and it also ends with a wedding. Tennyson's sister had been engaged to his friend Hallam (the object of the elegy), and several years after Hallam died she married someone else, in the same church where their father and other family members were buried. The closing sections of the poem explore the way grief can become folded into joy - both emotions are, after all, expressions of love - and there was one section in particular that struck me. The poet is addressing his dead friend, remembering an earlier time when he was able to shake off his grief (when he "rose up against my doom") and hoping that he might be able to do so again now (to "slip the thoughts of life and death" like an "inconsiderate boy"). It goes like this:

Oh, wast thou with me, dearest, then,
      While I rose up against my doom,
      And yearn'd to burst the folded gloom,
To bare the eternal Heavens again,

To feel once more, in placid awe,
      The strong imagination roll
      A sphere of stars about my soul,
In all her motion one with law;

If thou wert with me, and the grave
      Divide us not, be with me now,
      And enter in at breast and brow,
Till all my blood, a fuller wave,

Be quicken'd with a livelier breath,
      And like an inconsiderate boy,
      As in the former flash of joy,
I slip the thoughts of life and death;

And all the breeze of Fancy blows,
      And every dew-drop paints a bow,
      The wizard lightnings deeply glow,
And every thought breaks out a rose.

A sphere of stars about my soul: that was me, pretty much, just about a year ago. And, when I think about it now, every thought does, indeed, break out a rose.